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In my .emacs file I have the following line in custom-set-variables:

 '(initial-buffer-choice "~/Programming/C++/<some project I'm working on>")

This works great. However, I use emacs to edit lots of other files too. Before I inserted the above line in custom-set-variables, I could specify the file I intended to edit from the command line. For example, when I intended to edit a file called text_file.txt, I could type this command:

emacs text_file.txt

And emacs would startup with text_file.txt as the selected buffer. Now that I've specified initial-buffer-choice, regardless of what I say after emacs, emacs will always open the file specified in custom-set-variables, and not the file specified at command line. For example, the command

emacs text_file.txt

now opens ~/Programming/C++/<some project I'm working on> instead of text_file.txt.

How can I over ride initial-buffer-choice so when I do specify which file to open, that file will open?

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  • Could someone also help me out and add more tags to this question? I don't have enough reputation to create new tags, although some (custom-set-variables and initial-buffer-choice, perhaps) seem fitting to me.
    – user8810
    Jul 4, 2015 at 23:53
  • IMHO, a tag named initial-buffer-choice would be far to specific. You'd probably be the only question with that tag for a very, very long time. Therefore, the tag isn't terribly useful.
    – PythonNut
    Jul 5, 2015 at 0:02
  • @PythonNut I see. I should probably leave it to the meta and more experienced users to define tags.
    – user8810
    Jul 5, 2015 at 0:03

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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What happens after Emacs opens to your choice of initial-buffer-choice? If you then use C-x b do you see the file you specified on the command line as an available buffer to choose from? And is it perhaps even the default (try M-n to see if it gets pulled immediately to the minibuffer)?

If yes, then it sounds like Emacs is doing what you told it to:

  1. Visit the file you gave it on the command line.

  2. Show the initial buffer that you chose.

And it's not hard to use C-x b. If the file in question comes up as the default buffer to switch to, things are easier still.

If that is not what you see then this sounds like a bug to me. If you can repro the behavior starting from emacs -Q (with any other specific switches and settings specified as part of the recipe), then consider filing a bug report: M-x report-emacs-bug.

Note too that you can try setting initial-buffer-choice to a function that picks up a command-line file argument and uses that as the buffer to show.

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  • It turns out the specified files are opened. Like you said, I just have to C-x b to get to them.
    – user8810
    Jul 5, 2015 at 18:19
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Use a function for that checks if the current buffer has a filename.

(setq initial-buffer-choice
  (lambda ()
    (if (buffer-file-name)
      (current-buffer) ;; leave as-is
      (find-file "~/Programming/C++/<some project I'm working on>"))))

Fo a full example see this answer.

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